Isidora Stojanovic

• Doctor of Philosophy
• French National Centre for Scientific Research

This book is intended as a definitive guide to contemporary philosophy of language but with a twist: although some of the articles focus on technical issues more narrowly construed in the recent tradition of linguistically oriented philosophy of language, the majority focus on foundational questions in traditional philosophy of language. The aim is...

The semantic literature on negative expressive terms, such as ‘bastard’ and ‘jerk’, converges on two assumptions. First, the content associated with expressives is attitudinal; more precisely, it amounts to the condition that the agent (typically the speaker) has a negative attitude toward the target (that is, the person referred to with the expres...

We investigate experimentally whether the perceived offensiveness of slurs survives when they are reported, by comparing Italian slurs and insults in base utterances (Y is an S), direct speech (X said: “Y is an S”), mixed quotation (X said that Y is “an S”), and indirect speech (X said that Y is an S). For all strategies, reporting decreases the pe...

The nature of moral judgments, and, more specifically, the question of how they relate, on the one hand, to objective reality and, on the other, to subjective experience, are issues that have been central to metaethics from its very beginnings. While these complex and challenging issues have been debated by analytic philosophers for over a century,...

Chapter for the Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy of Language, edited by Ernie Lepore and Una Stojnic

The nature of moral judgments, and, more specifically, the question of how they relate, on the one hand, to objective reality and, on the other, to subjective experience, are issues that have been central to metaethics from its very beginnings. While these complex and challenging issues have been debated by analytic philosophers for over a century,...

The present chapter concerns arguments whose conclusions take the form of a prescription such as you ought to do such-and-such, which have driven much public discussion and policy since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. We aim to tackle a hitherto under-explored characteristic of many such normative arguments, namely, the relationship between...

The nature of moral judgments, and, more specifically, the ques0on of how they relate, on the one hand, to objec0ve reality and, on the other, to subjec0ve experience, are issues that have been central to metaethics from its very beginnings. While these complex and challenging issues have been debated by analy0c philosophers for over a century, it...

Este artículo hace balance del lugar que el argumento del desacuerdo sin falta ha ocupado en la filosofía del lenguaje en los últimos veinte años, en particular en el debate entre contextualismo y relativismo. En contra de lo que afirman los relativistas, el estudio ofrecido en la primera parte del artículo muestra que el fenómeno del desacuerdo no...

Free indirect discourse (FID) is a style of reporting speech and thought that combines third-personal narration with direct, first-personal discourse. Expressive terms, such as “idiot” or “asshole”, are known to occur in FID. When so used, the pejorative content reflects the protagonist’s rather than the narrator’s point of view. This chapter broad...

The Language of Fiction brings together new research on fiction from philosophy and linguistics. Fiction is a topic that has long been studied in philosophy. Yet recently there has been a surge of work on fictional discourse in the intersection between linguistics and philosophy of language. There has been a growing interest in examining long-stand...

We present two experimental studies on the Italian expressive ‘stronzo’ (English ‘jerk’). The first study tests whether, and to which extent, the acceptability of using an expressive is sensitive to the information available in the context. The study looks both at referential uses of expressives (as in the complex demonstrative ‘that jerk Marco’) a...

Indexicality is a special kind of context dependence. The first person pronoun I, a paradigmatic indexical, refers to different people in different contexts, depending on who is speaking. At the same time, the pronoun I has a stable linguistic meaning, which amounts to a rule that tells us how to assign it a semantic value in any given context. Thi...

This position paper of Working Group 2 of the European Network for Argumentation and Public Policy Analysis (COST Action CA17132; https://publicpolicyargument.eu) reviews goals and functions of public argumentation. Drawing on a variety of disciplines, the paper introduces basic distinctions and charts out options. It is meant to guide reflection o...

This paper argues that there is a class of terms, or uses of terms, that are best accounted for by an expressivist account. We put forward two sets of criteria to distinguish between expressive and factual (uses of) terms. The first set relies on the action-guiding nature of expressive language. The second set relies on the difference between one's...

The aim of this paper is to argue against a growing tendency to assimilate moral disagreements to disagreements about matters of personal taste. The argumentative strategy adopted in the paper appeals to a battery of linguistic criteria that reveal interesting and important differences between predicates of personal taste and moral predicates. The...

This chapter surveys some recent studies of aesthetic adjectives in theoretical and experimental linguistics, evaluates the impact of these studies on our conceptual understanding of aesthetic discourse, and discusses the prospects for future investigations. After providing some background on the semantics of adjectives, I present the experiments f...

This paper has two aims. The first is to provide a characterization of evaluative predicates (‘good’, ‘horrible’, ‘beautiful’). The second is to explain how ordinary predicates, such as ‘intense’ or ‘insane’, may be used evaluatively, and how they convey sometimes a positive and sometimes a negative evaluation, depending on the context. I propose a...

This paper is an occasion to take stock of the place that the argument from faultless disagreement has occupied in philosophy of language in the last fifteen years, in particular in the debate between contextualism and relativism. The survey offered in the first part of the paper appears to show that the phenomenon of disagreement fails to provide...

Aesthetic judgments are often expressed by means of predicates that, unlike ?beautiful? or ?ugly?, are not primarily aesthetic, or even evaluative, such as ?intense? and ?harrowing?. This paper aims to explain how such adjectives can convey a value-judgment, and one, moreover, whose positive or negative valence depends on the context.

In this paper, the authors present a presuppositional account for a class of evaluative terms that encode both a descriptive and an evaluative component: slurs and thick terms. The authors discuss several issues related to the hybrid nature of these terms, such as their projective behavior, the ways in which one may reject their evaluative content,...

Our paper discusses Recanati’s application of the mental files apparatus to reports of beliefs and other attitudes. While mental files appear early on in Recanati’s work on belief-reports, his latest book introduces the concept of indexed files (a.k.a. vicarious files) and puts it to work to explain how we can report other people’s attitudes and to...

To appear in Burgess, A. and Sherman, B. (Eds.) Metasemantics, OUP (expected publication date: July 2014)

This paper is driven by the idea that the contextualism‐relativism debate regarding the semantics of value‐attributions turns on certain extra‐semantic assumptions that are unwarranted. One is the assumption that the many‐place predicate of truth, deployed by compositional semantics, cannot be directly appealed to in theorizing about people's asses...

When we describe an event as sad or happy, we attribute to it a certain emotional value. Attributions of emotional value depend essentially on an agent (and on his or her emotional responses); and yet, people readily disagree over such values. My aim in this paper is to explain what happens in the case of “emotional disagreement”, and, more general...

It has been long known (Perry in Philos Rev 86: 474–497, 1977; Noûs 13: 3–21, 1979, Lewis in Philos Rev 88: 513–543 1981) that de se attitudes, such as beliefs and desires that one has about oneself, call for a special treatment in theories of attitudinal content. The aim of this paper is to raise similar concerns for theories of asserted content....

In this paper, I argue that there are good motivations for a relativist account of domain-sensitivity of quantifier phrases. I will frame the problem as a puzzle involving what looks like a logically valid inference, yet whose premises are true while the conclusion is false. After discussing some existing accounts, literalist and contextualist, I w...

It has been long known (Perry in Philos Rev 86: 474–497, 1977; Noûs 13: 3–21, 1979, Lewis in Philos Rev 88: 513–543 1981) that de se attitudes, such as beliefs and desires that one has about oneself, call for a special treatment in theories of attitudinal content. The aim of this paper is to raise similar concerns for theories of asserted content....

chapter for the volume Introduction to the Philosophy of John Perry, ed. by Raphael van Riel and Albert Newen

These are the slides of the five lectures in the series "Topics in Philosophy of Language", offered as a course at the 23rd ESSLLI in Ljubljana, in August 2011.

to appear in a special issue of the Croatian Journal of Philosophy

Formal semantics emerged at the interface of logic and philosophy of language in the early 1970's as a result of using tools provided by logic and model-theory to study natural language. We start by discussing the philosophical motivations, in particular compositionality and truth-conditionality, behind those early developments. We then turn to the...

In this paper, I explore several ways of incorporating proper names into the sort of account that I have defended elsewhere, according to which indexicals and demonstratives do not contribute reference to semantic content (nor, for that matter, anything else). I showthat some of the dominant accounts of names, including the Kripkean-Kaplanian refer...

The goal of this paper is to propose an account of the notion of semantic content. I will try to show that my account has some advantages over the existing accounts, and that, at the same time, it captures the most valuable insights behind both parties involved in the contextualism-minimalism debate. The proposed account of semantic content differs...

When Truth Gives Out, written in an engaging and accessible style, develops around the idea that the notion of truth, contrary to a lot of received wisdom from philosophy of language and logic, is not – or at least, not always – the right concept to employ in analyzing belief, assertion, or their evaluation. The review explains, discusses and criti...

In this paper, I argue against the view there are contingent a priori truths, and against the related view that there are contingent logical truths. I will suggest that in general, predicates ›a priori‹ and ›contingent‹ are implicitly relativized to circumstances, and argue that apriority entails necessity, whenever the two are relativized to the s...

In recent years, a number of new trends have seen light at the intersection of semantics and philosophy of language. They are meant to address puzzles raised by the context-sensitivity of a variety of natural language constructions, such as knowledge ascriptions, belief reports, epistemic modals, indicative conditionals, quantifier phrases, gradabl...

This chapter aims at defending semantic relativism from a general methodological viewpoint. In the classic non-relativistic approach, the parameters relevant for the interpretation of indexical expressions coincide with the parameters involved in the definition of truth. It is argued that this identification is grounded on an illicit confusion betw...

One of the most promising aspects of Perry (2001)'s Reflexive-Referential Theory (henceforth RRT) is its capacity to generate a variety of contents that may be associated with a single utterance, contents that may be used for various explanatory purposes. My concern in this paper is that, as it stands, RRT generates too many contents. The problem i...

Since Saul Kripke’s Naming and Necessity, the view that there are contingent a priori truths has been surprisingly widespread. In this paper, I argue against that view. My first point is that in general, occurrences of predicates “a priori” and “contingent” are implicitly relativized to some circumstance, involving an agent, a time, a location. My...

In this paper, I take issue with an idea that has emerged from recent relativist proposals, and, in particular, from Lasersohn (2005), according to which the correct semantics for taste predicates must use contents that are functions of a judge parameter (in addition to a possible world parameter) rather than implicit arguments lexically associated...

I investigate the relationship among the notions of meaning, content, and what is said. It is widely held that indexicals – words like 'this', 'I', or 'today' – contribute their reference, and nothing but their reference, to the semantic content, and thereby undermine any tentative identification of semantic content with lexical meaning. Against th...

Focusing on the issue of what it is that "directly referential" expressions, such as pronouns, contribute to what is said, the paper discusses a series of problems for the mainstream (Kaplanian) theories of what is said, and defends the view according to which what is said (by a sentence in a context) is nothing more or less than the lexical meanin...

L’objectif de notre article est de clarifier les rapports existant entre plusieurs phénomènes qui possèdent chacun certaines caractéristiques de ce qui est appelé la « déférence ». Nous proposerons une distinction entre la déférence linguistique, qui concerne l’utilisation du langage et le sens des mots que nous employons, et la déférence épistémiq...

One of the most interesting and fruitful applications of logics, classical or other, has been in supplying formal frameworks for the semantics of natural language. In this paper, I discuss the following puzzle: there seem to be arguments that are logically valid - more precisely, that are instances of the rule of universal instantiation, and yet, t...

Philosophers of language distinguish among the lexical or linguistic meaning of the sentence uttered, what is said by an utterance of the sentence, and speaker's meaning, or what is conveyed by the speaker to her audience. In most views, what is said is the semantic or truth-conditional content of the utterance, and is irreducible either to the lin...

The received view about indexicals holds that they are directly referential expressions, and that the semantic contribution of an indexical consists of that thing or individual to which the indexical refers in the context of its utterance. The aim of this paper is to put forward a different picture. I argue that direct reference and indexicality ar...

Our aim in this paper is to clarify the distinctions and the relationships among several phenomena, each of which has certain characteristics of what is generally called “deference”. We distinguish linguistic deference, which concerns the use of language and the meaning of the words we use, from epistemic deference, which concerns our reasons and e...

Discussions in philosophy of language, semantics, and pragmatics, often make crucial use of the notion of what is said. It is held that in order to account for our intuitions on what is said, we need a distinguished semantic level. A tripartite distinction is made among what the sentence means independently from the context of utterance, what it me...

Carl Ginet has proposed to define action as being intentional if and only if its agent simultaneously has a de re intention to be doing that very action. Ginet does not exactly tell us what makes an attitude like intention de re (or, in his terms, directly referential); rather, he takes the notion of de re attitude for granted. The gist of my paper...

Incomplete" definite descriptions (i.e. descriptions that violate the uniqueness constraint) have been o#ered various accounts in semantics.

“Incomplete” definite descriptions (i.e. descriptions that violate the uniqueness constraint) have been offered various accounts in semantics. Among them, the so-called ellipsis account, which analyzes “the F” as elliptical for “the F which is that F”. I begin by arguing that the objections raised against this account have not been conclusive, and...

Philosophers used to model belief as a relation between agents and propositions, which bear truth values depending on, and only on, the way the world is, until John Perry and David Lewis came up with cases of essentially indexical belief; that is, belief whose expression involves some indexical word, whose reference varies with the context. I shall...

Since Saul Kripke's Naming and Necessity, the view that there are contingent a priori truths has been surprisingly widespread. In this paper, I argue against that view. My first point is that in general, occurrences of predicates "a priori" and "contingent" are implicitly relativized to some circumstance, involving an agent, a time, a location. My...